AP reports today: “Developing nations’ hopes for forging a new, more
just economic world order appear unlikely to be quickly realized as the
United Nations’ Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis
draws to a close Friday.”
http://www.dailymail.com/ap/ApBusiness/200906260088

On Thursday, Ecuadorean President Rafeal Correa said member states
should consider abolishing the International Monetary Fund. He also
criticized the profit-driven financial system: “We who want to be
citizens of the world cannot understand schemes that always end up
trampling and enslaving the poorest, which contradict their own
posturing. How can we understand the so-called globalization that does
not seek to create world citizens, but only consumers. It does not seek
to create a global society, just a global market.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/26/headlines

Currently at the UN conference in New York City:

BEVERLY KEENE, http://www.jubileesouth.org
LEO ATAKPU, http://www.aneej.org
International coordinator of Jubilee South (based in Buenos Aires,
Argentina), Keene said today: “With the failure of the European Union,
the U.S., Japan and other North countries to rise to the challenges put
forth by the UN Conference, to address the impact of the present
financial, economic, food, and climate crises straight on and recognize
that the same institutions and interests that provoked the mess cannot
be expected to clean it up, we can expect the crises themselves to
continue to deepen, with devastating impacts on peoples and the environment.
“But alternatives now emerging throughout the South will be
strengthened, including steps toward the non-payment of illegitimate
debts — safeguarding the resources absorbed by debt servicing for
crises responses — and withdrawal from trade pacts and investment
treaties that curtail countries’ capacity to fulfill their basic human
rights obligations.”
Deputy director of the African Network on Economic and
Environmental Justice (based in Benin City, Nigeria), Atakpu said today:
“When the world leaders set out with bailout funds for companies in the
U.S. and Europe at the beginning of the current global financial and
economic crises, billions of dollars were committed to salvage car
factories and sundry institutions. Now that the problem which they and
the institutions they dominate helped to create has spread to the
developing countries, and the lives of millions of poor people are in
jeopardy, we ask for the same kind of rescue. But they are
foot-dragging, proffering instead the same old measures that have hardly
worked — deploying new languages and tactics. It is a shame.”

SOREN AMBROSE, http://www.actionaid.org
Development finance coordinator of ActionAid International (based
in Nairobi, Kenya), Ambrose said today: “In preparation for the UN
Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on
Development, a diverse panel of experts led by Nobel Prize-winning
economist Joseph Stiglitz came up with a compendium of innovative
proposals to combat future crises by stabilizing and balancing the
top-heavy global economy. Some of those, including reform of the global
system of currency reserves and the use of the IMF’s ‘special drawing
rights’ to support impoverished countries, will at least be mentioned in
the conference declaration when the conference ends on Friday.
“Unfortunately the rich countries, led by the U.S. and European
Union, want to preserve the model that has failed so spectacularly, so
there will be no firm commitments agreed to, and many of the best ideas
— such as a Global Economic Coordination Council on par with the UN
Security Council, global coordination of financial regulations, and an
International Bankruptcy Court — will be left out. With the World Bank
announcing on Monday that a trillion dollars is likely to drain out of
the poorest countries this year because of the crisis caused by the
U.S., it’s tragic to see the opportunity represented by this UN
conference being undermined because the rich want to try to preserve
their advantages.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167